What’s New In OS X 10.6 10A402: Lots Of Speed

Although Apple has publicly announced that its next generation OS won’t ship until September, still nearly two months off, development appears to be rapidly grinding to a close. Yesterday’s OS X 10.6 developer seed arrived with spit and polish improvements, the kind one would expect to see in a release candidate or gold master.

Although fleshy details and benchmarks haven’t yet appeared, reports on 9 to 5 Mac and MacRumors Forums echo each other in what’s new Snow Leopard 10A402:

• Much faster performance all around

— Five second shutdown (that’ll be nice)

— Safari is much snappier

• Battery meter now reports 30 percent longer life (untested)

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• Exposé on multiple monitors is fixed

— List view in the Dock

• Third party System Preference panes now work

• New build [42] of Quicktime 10.0

Also, how do we know this is a major update? Well, it’s said by those in the know that Snow Leopard 10A402 weighs an impressive 1.3GB.

Lastly, as I and others have previously noted, the Expose and Dock improvements in Snow Leopard certainly bring a “touch” feel (groan) to the new OS that many think indicates the imminent arrival of the long-fabled Mac touch (aka iPod touch on steroids)…

What’s your take?